How to build self-discipline when motivation keeps running out

If you draw your motivation from your values, it does not disappear, because your values do not change. You were born with them and you will die with them. One of mine is that God gave me a body and it is my responsibility to keep it healthy. So the question I ask is simple: what is the gap between that value and where I am right now?

Ten years ago I was badly overweight and I smoked all the time. Both pulled against that value, and living against your own values creates a constant discomfort. In Sudanese Arabic we call it gelag, a low hum of anxiety and stress. I stopped smoking first. For anyone who smokes, that is far harder than losing weight, and once you have done it you feel you can do anything. Then the next gap appears: lose the weight. Then the next: become fit and strong. The value stays the same and keeps showing you the next step.

Here is an experiment I did many years ago. Imagine that today is your funeral. What do you want to hear people saying about you? Those are the things that matter most to you. For me it is that I was a good father, a good member of my family, and healthy and strong.

Once you know your values, the discomfort you feel day to day starts to make sense. Look at any moment when you feel uneasy and you will almost always find a conflict between one of your values and what is happening in your life. I was happy and overweight, because I like food, but I was never comfortable being overweight. I fought white-collar boxing matches and ran 10 kilometre races to find the motivation to lose the weight. The key was never the motivation. It was the value, and staying focused on it.

About 15 years ago I started running to lose weight and set myself a goal: a 10 kilometre race in under 50 minutes. At first I was running 10 kilometres in about an hour and a half, mostly walking. Then running became a daily habit. My first race took 58 minutes, the next 54, and a few months later I ran 49:52, exactly on target. Within a year I had put a lot of the weight back on.

Motivation disappears the moment the goal is done. What is left to push for? If I had stopped and asked why I was running, I would have seen that it was never about 10 kilometres in under 50 minutes. I will never need to do that in real life. It was about a healthy body and a healthy mind, and a value like that has no finish line. Motivation works like a drip, or a beep you have to answer every time. The first time you are excited. By the thirtieth it has drained away, and you are fighting yourself to do the thing. I explore the same idea from another angle in motivation vs discipline.

Focus hard on your values and you will have to ask difficult questions, the main one being whether you can say no. You go to a friend's house and they bring out cake or pasta. Saying no can feel rude, or at least we are raised to believe it is. But eating it would go against your values. The point is not that you are motivated to refuse right now. It is that you are not the person who eats those things.

At work, one of my values is to always have an impact. That means a lot of no's. A client says they want these social media posts and these videos. They can have them, but there is no value there, so we do the things we know make a difference. Whenever you face this choice, you are choosing between two no's: no to the person in front of you, or no to your own values. Your auntie will be upset for five seconds that you did not eat her pasta. You will always know that you said no to yourself, and over time that wears down your self-esteem until you start saying "I can't". Try saying "I can't yet" instead. Then ask what the gap is, and what you need to learn to close it.

Most of the time you already have the knowledge. How do you quit smoking? Do not smoke. How do you lose weight? Move more and eat less. The hard part is holding the value above everything and everyone else, which is especially difficult in a society where we work so hard to keep everyone happy.

Then there is too much information. There are probably a million videos on TikTok about how to do a deadlift, and most of them disagree. When I was growing up we had the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it said nothing about deadlifts, so you listened to your body. Information overload creates procrastination and noise, and inside that noise is the signal. Instinctively, you know it when you hear it. Business works the same way. There are a thousand things you could do to bring in customers, and five of them work, either because you know what brought your existing customers or because they work for others in your field. Do those five things, again and again. When you solve one problem, the next one arrives, with another million videos to watch. Keep coming back to the signal.

Businesses have values too. The one I have built into Cush Digital since the start is relentlessness: ask more of yourself than is reasonable. Most of us accept a working week of Sunday to Thursday, nine to five, and define our output by a job description. If you go to work to develop yourself, then be unreasonable with yourself, and stop measuring your standard against what everyone else does.

As I tell it in the episode, Kobe Bryant decided his goal was not to be a professional basketball player but the best in the world, so he roughly doubled the training sessions other players did, day after day. In Sudan, I added up the people I had trained in digital marketing and found it was a few hundred. I set a goal of 1,000 people in six months. People told me it was too much. It ended up being 4,000 people in six months, sometimes three training sessions a day, for 20 or 30 days at a stretch. I did not need motivation, because the goal matched my values. If you are early in your career, our episode on why a degree alone won't prepare you for work makes a similar case.

Define your values. Do the funeral experiment. Turn your values into goals and find the gap. If the knowledge really is missing, go and study. Then stop waiting for motivation, and focus on the value as the person you want to become. Nobody became successful lying in bed watching TikTok.